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Sunday, September 07, 2014

Too Much of a Good Thing?

If you've followed my spinning at all, then you know I like a lot of twist in my yarns. In most cases, that can be a good thing, because I spin a lot of sock yarn and extra twist can mean added durability. However, putting in a lot of twist can be a hard habit to break, and there are times when it's not as desirable. That might be the case for the yarn that came off my wheel this past Monday.

This was 4 oz. of Bee Mice Elf mixed BFL/silk, the last shipment I got when I was still in the fiber club, a colorway called Well Preserved. I split it in half (by folding the length of top in two and ripping at the fold line) so that any colors that lined up would be purely accidental. It took me a really long time to spin up all the singles and a good day and a half to ply, but I ended up with roughly 663 yards of two-ply lace weight. Sounds good so far, right? Here's the rub: As much as I snapped the skein after washing to distribute the twist, there's still a good about of plying twist left in it.

If you look closely just below the penny in this shot, you can see a little pigtail where the yarn has twisted back on itself. There are a quite a few spots like that in the skein. Now, if I knit this into a lace item and block the heck out of it (as I normally do), it likely won't be an issue, but sometimes I want my lace yarn to have a little more softness to it, so I'm considering running this back through the wheel very quickly to take out just a little of the excess twist.

The twist issue aside, I'm very pleased with this yarn. The colors are beautiful, and the skein has a really attractive luster to it. It was also a very pleasant spin. I left the BME club because I was a little unhappy with part of the experience, but the fiber quality didn't have anything to do with it. This braid was prepped well and drafted beautifully. Other than an occasional small slub of silk (which seems to be pretty common in a silk blend), there were no issues.

Meanwhile, I'm continuing to make slow but steady progress on my Fat Cat Knits Polwarth/silk. Here it was earlier this afternoon:

This was near the end of the second strip of fiber, and shortly after I took this photo, I joined in the third strip, so I'm now back into purple. This means that I'm just slightly more than halfway done. It's going to take some serious time to get it all done (and I don't even want to think about how long it will take to chain ply), but I know I'm going to love this yarn when it's done. I can see that I'm making a dent when I sit down for any length of time, so I'm going to make an effort to fit in some more spinning during the week.